November 10, 2003

While righteous Arabs were killing less righteous Arabs, thus bringing astute observers closer to the realization that we Westerners are merely proxy targets in an internal conflict, I was having dinner with Gore Vidal.

No real table was set and we had no real conversation, because the meal--a gathering, really, at some nameless large house that I haven't visited before--was the direct result of two hours' worth of Vidal broadcast on WBAI Friday afternoon in lieu of the usual jazz programming due to the illness of the usual Jazz Programmer. It made for entertaining listening on the drive home. Vidal has long possessed in abundance the sort of arrogance that disguises itself as irony ("There is not one human problem that could not be solved," he once said, "if people would simply do as I advise."). But he's witty, and erudite, and when necessary wraps his wackier ideas in civility and culture with that rumbly, measured voice of his. WBAI broadcast talks that he gave in 1981, and I laughed at both his pithy observations and his mistaken prognostications ("America is now permanently behind Japan and Western Europe economically," he intoned). As I sped along the highway Friday afternoon, I thought, "Well, I certainly disagree with him, but he'd be a great dinner companion."

And so I had dinner with him, sometime last night while I slept. I don't remember any details about the occasion, only that it happened, and that he was, in fact, a great dinner companion. This, in turn, has reminded me of Michael Barone's recent US News article, "Harshness and Vitriol," concerning the general poor quality of political discourse I and many others have been observing. He writes,

Why this increased harshness? My explanation: It is a baby boom thing. What we are seeing is a civil war between the two halves of the baby boom, the liberal half that basked in national publicity in the late 1960s and the conservative half that smoldered in resentment for many years until its more recent rise to prominence. The first example of such harshness in national politics came in October 1992 in the vice presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Al Gore, the first two baby boomers to run against each other. This was a rock 'em, sock 'em debate--a sharp contrast with the careful, deferential tone that baby boomer Bill Clinton employed toward GI-generation George H. W. Bush.

Like the elder Bush, Vidal is of the GI generation, a year younger than the former President. And even though his views are cock-eyed and, often, downright conspiratorial, there is a degree of civility in his persona, backed up by an undeniable intellect, that allows me to give him a certain respect that so many of those who have attempted to ape him simply do not deserve.

Barone's piece didn't explore the idea that these days, many of the uncultured, rude, moronic bleats of "opposition" from all sides of the amateur political amphitheater aren't coming from Boomers. We've got Boomers like Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman heading up the professional wrestling matches. But the obscene level of willful ignorance found in the comments threads and on the discussion boards of today's political Internet isn't buoyed by folks in their late forties and fifties. No, that particular brand of incivility is the contribution of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, of the in-college and the recently-graduated.

On the leftward side of things, there are many such young'uns along the Chomsky/Vidal axis who spout the exact same ideas, tinted with the same sort of loopiness, as their admired intellectual and spiritual fathers. But they have received these ideas as gospel, and when an actual debate erupts and their unsupported facades collapse, all that is left is invective, insult, and ad hominen. Likewise, devotees of the Coulter/Limbaugh style of savage banter adopt that mode of presentation without the rapid-fire facility with language that props up those rightward media stars, with the exact same results. It's embarrassing to watch, in either case.

Perhaps, among the American hoi polloi, it's always been this way. Perhaps the great bulk of the politically-engaged or semi-engaged population has always been rude, and uncivil, and quick to hitch a ride on the coat-tails of those who possess intellectual vigor, and whose ideas they find most compatible with their own prejudices. Perhaps the Information Age has given us all a clearer window onto a scene that has always existed, simply by allowing more people to speak out in the public square, and to be heard by a greater audience. Such an expansion of speech is beneficial.

However, the qualitative trend is not so promising. It's as though, once their public parents began to retire and fade away, politically-minded Boomers of all stripes have given full vent to the same spoiled, adolescent tantrums that were on such raucous display in The Sixties (TM). In the prime of their lives and at the height of their influence, they present us with the disagreeable spectacle of an adult Romper Room. With the most visible portions of the public square scattered with intellectual Lincoln Logs and full of debaters who need nap-time, is it any surprise that the virtual square of the next generation is so well-populated with snark, empty rants, and mayhem for mayhem's sake?

So, to those political and media Boomers who seem to be so intent on working out their politics as neurotically as possible, I say: grow up.

Your kids are watching.